This invention relates generally to vehicles, and more particularly to sustained or supplemented functionality and/or features.
Personal, commercial, and industrial vehicles of various kinds are known in the art, and include automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, recreational vehicles of various kinds, boats, trailers, trains (both locomotives and cars) to name a few. Many such vehicles include various on-board systems that provide various kinds of specific functionality. For example, a modern automobile may include upwards of eighty microcontrollers/microprocessors with corresponding attendant memory to discretely support engine control, automatic window control, braking systems, cockpit temperature control, entertainment systems, and so forth. Furthermore, the respective quantity of such functionality tends to be increasing rather than decreasing or reaching a static condition.
At any given moment, typically, each such identifiable quantum of capacity is not used to a maximum extent. Some such components function only occasionally, if ever, while others experience intermittent rather than continuous usage. Viewed collectively, excess capacity in any given vehicle exists in varying amounts from moment to moment.
This observation can be extended when considering a plurality of vehicles (such as a managed fleet of vehicles, a group of vehicles comprising a similar model as manufactured by a common manufacturer, or simply a group of vehicles that all tend to operate in a common geographic area). That is, some given functional element as shared by most or all of the vehicles in a group of vehicles is unlikely to be maximally used in each such vehicle at all times. Viewed across the group, again, excess capacity exists for such elements.
Such excess capacity, both within an individual vehicle and with respect to a group of vehicles, constitutes an opportunity to benefit any number of parties, including the vehicle operators themselves and others. To date, however, such excess capacity remains an untapped opportunity. Vehicles, both as discrete entities and as part of a larger group of vehicles, tend to be designed with unexploited excess capacity being the norm.